Daily Pulse: Tracking Mood in The Workplace

Celpax’s Daily Pulse is an interesting way to gauge the mood of the workplace. Understanding these metrics can help manage office morale.

aNewDomain — In today’s businesses and corporations, morale is one of the more important keys for being successful. For company employees, day-to-day tasks can take a toll on emotions and work ethic, so it’s important that the management team is aware of the emotional pulse and overall mood of the staff.

Tracking morale is not necessarily easy, though. No worries — Celpax has come up with a tool, called Daily Pulse, which aids management in tracking the mood of the workplace.

What is Daily Pulse?

Daily Pulse is a simple device that can be mounted on a wall, just like a door sensor is mounted for security. On the Daily Pulse module, though, there’s a touch screen interface that displays a question in text. The question will always ask for a simple, Yes/No response, which each employee is expected to respond to at some point in the day.

An example: “Is today a good day for you?”

The employee simply presses Yes or No and continues on with their work.

As you can imagine, each click results in a data point, which is sent to Daily Pulse servers, hosted by Celpax, via GSM. That’s right, there’s no web connection. Simple enough.

Why is this data important?

The reality is that mood in the workplace is central to productivity and quality of life. Corporate America is hell-bent on working to the bone or suing when boundaries are pushed, rather than resolving matters in an on-going, professional way.

When controversial issues bubble up at work (which will happen), employees are often very guarded and might act out. This behavior leads to discussions about the incident and possible ramifications, which increases office gossip and lowers the morale. Nobody wants to be a victim. All of this, in turn, decreases production and quality assurance, which is bad for everybody.

The Daily Pulse module is unique because it can privately capture data in an easy, hassle-free way. And, due to the Yes/No metric, the data can be crunched effectively. Questions that allow for gray areas, like “How happy are you?” can incite a gray response.

A great example would be a question related to new corporate procedures: “Do you like the new TPS reports?”

That’s a simple question directly related to the office’s culture. It’s pretty common to take a pulse soon after procedural change — you reach the staff in a peak emotional state. This change might upset the staff — change is usually disliked — and with Daily Pulse you can gauge the answer right away. And no names, IDs or other personal data is collected, which gives employees even more confidence when they respond. The data accessible via Daily Pulse can be easily analyzed from the modules web dashboard and can provide multiple reporting options and analysis.

A fiscal quarter passes, and it’s time for another Daily Pulse. Why not ask the same question — “Do you like the current TPS reports?”— and see how the office has enjoyed the transition. If they are still upset, maybe the new TPS reports are difficult to work with.

These metrics can be quite useful in monitoring as well as managing office morale. I’m not one to think TPS reports will set the office staff on edge, but I do believe that having a staff that gets on board with procedural changes makes the business run more effectively. Sure, not all changes can be modified to meet the needs of everyone, but compromises are always acceptable. And when compromises are accepted, morale gets a boost. When morale is high, productivity, efficiency and innovation thrive.

Daily Pulse from Celpax sure is interesting. Do you have it in your workplace? What do you think about boosting morale in the office? Let me know in the comments.

2 Comments

I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve also never worked in an office that seemed to put any effort into evaluating, let alone improving, office morale. I have worked from home for 5 years now, but the office morale still affects me. Being a remote worker makes it that much easier for my employer to discount my morale. I’d love to see something like this for our company.

Just wanted to clarify that the device actually always asks the same question: How was your day? This gives you a baseline, i.e. 72% of the employees press green on a normal day. You can then easily see the impact on your employee mood the day you communicate important company news, organize an event, or see the impact of going through reorganizations, etc. Thank you so much for writing about us Anthony!